In the Adirondacks, Storm-Battered and Cut Off

Residents of this part of upstate New York thought they knew all the extremes that weather could heap on them. Then came Tropical Storm Irene.

ALISSA J. RUBIN

KEENE, N.Y. — To those just driving through, the hamlet of Keene never looked like much, even before Tropical Storm Irene.

It takes all of five minutes, going slowly, to get from one end to the other, and there are no great historical monuments. Barely worth mentioning was a little stream that county maps call Gulf Brook, a picturesque waterway littered with boulders that usually create a friendly burble.

On Sunday it became a raging torrent, uprooting small birches and poplars that grew along its banks, carrying rocks down from the mountains and then eating away the bank on which Keene’s volunteer fire department had its offices and engines and plaques with the names of almost every man who had served the department going back decades.

At 4:15 p.m., as the rain was sluicing off roofs in sheets, the firemen moved the trucks to higher ground. And at 6:07, one of the firemen said, “the firehouse went down.”

Half of the building broke apart and cascaded into the brook, which by now resembled a river and was rumbling through the village, flowing into the basements of each of the little houses along it, carrying bits of the firehouse with it.

A mobile home that sat near the brook was whipsawed, part of its siding peeled off. The little coffee shop whose young proprietors had struggled to make a go of it, with a sign saying “Espresso and Cappuccino” for all the summer folk who come from espresso and cappuccino land, saw its new back deck, where people used to sit and listen to the brook, twisted and broken as if a tornado had come through.

Boulders were scattered through backyards, and pieces of people’s lives from upstream tumbled down into other people’s lives. Propane tanks washed down the brook, along with “for sale” signs and porch furniture. Across the way, a house that was being refurbished was all but ruined; and down where the brook meets the East Branch of the Ausable River, the water overflowed its banks, washing mud more than two feet deep into homes and into the Cedar Run bakery, which was known for its muffins.

Residents of this part of the Adirondacks thought they knew all the extremes that weather could heap on them, but David McDonough, who owns McDonough’s Valley Hardware in Keene Valley, another hamlet in the Town of Keene, said this was “worse than anything I can remember.”

Upsetting as mud is, it can be cleaned up. Harder to bear is that the town, especially Keene Valley and the hamlet of St. Huberts, are now cut off from the most direct route to Interstate 87, known as the Adirondack Northway, which for decades has brought most of the business to this corner of the North Country.

On Sunday, the rushing waters flooded and eroded the valley’s main road, Route 73, buckling it as if there had been an earthquake. In the micro-economy that sustains the area, the biggest sector is tourism, and if people cannot get there, well, that’s it. The Noon Mark Diner, the first restaurant in Keene Valley for travelers coming from the Northway, used to be so full that cars overflowed its parking lot; on Wednesday it was nearly empty.

“We lost Labor Day and probably Columbus Day,” said Nancy Piserchia, who owns the local taxidermy shop, where multiple deer antlers decorate the sign.

In fact, it will most likely take much longer to repair the road.

“They’ll be lucky to get 73 going again before the bad weather sets in,” said Mr. McDonough of the hardware store, whose family are longtime residents. He saw much of his stock destroyed, every nail and screw it seemed coated with mud, and was dispirited until scores of locals and summer residents, many with their children in tow, came on Monday to help him and his wife, Paula, clean up, because the hardware store was part of the town’s life. Practically everyone went to the hardware store every week for a battery or a rake, a can of paint or a bag of birdseed, and for news of the valley.

The Town of Keene, which has 1,105 year-round residents, encompasses the highest peaks of the Adirondacks, including the 5,344-foot Mount Marcy. More than half of the town’s 165 square miles are too rugged to have ever been settled.

In the 1790s, settlers came into the valley, where subsistence farming was possible. They were hardscrabble English immigrants and French; to this day there are names like LeClair and Estes, Edmunds and Gibbs in the phone book, descendants of those in the cemetery.

The loss of the firehouse was hardest for the town, and when Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo visited Keene on Tuesday, he made a point of stopping where it once stood. Almost everyone in Keene has either volunteered with the department and its emergency medical team, or has a relative who has.

“That department is such a big part of our community,” said Marcy LeClair, whose husband had worked with the department before he died a few years ago. “The night that the firehouse went down and all those plaques were scattered — well, a lot more was lost than a building.”